The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has chosen Sabey Data Centers as its colocation partner for the Horizon supercomputer.

Plans for the Horizon supercomputer were announced in July this year.

Horizon is now set to be hosted at Sabey’s Austin facility, SDC Austin, in Texas.

SDC Austin is located in Round Rock and has a capacity of more than 85MW across 430,000 sq ft (40,000 sqm).

“We are excited to announce Sabey as the home for Horizon and future LCCF systems,” said Dan Stanzione, executive director of TACC and associate vice president for research at UT Austin.

“We have entered a unique partnership with Sabey to leverage all the advantages of colocation with our very specific needs for cutting-edge, high-density supercomputing. The demands of AI have driven the commercial data center space to look more like supercomputing data centers - liquid cooling, high density, and high efficiency. We look forward to an innovative and productive partnership as we venture off campus and work ever more closely with the private sector.”

According to the University of Texas, when operational, Horizon will become the largest academic supercomputer in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) portfolio, dedicated to open-scientific research. It will provide a 10x simulation performance improvement and a 100x increase in AI performance over Frontera, the TACC’s current leading supercomputer.

The funding comes from the $11.3bn assigned to the NSF by the US government in March 2023, specifically earmarked “to support science and engineering research that requires the largest and most computationally intensive capabilities research infrastructure.”

In addition to Frontera, the TACC is also home to the Stallion supercomputer and the Lonestar6 cluster, which was deployed in 2021. The company recently announced plans for a new Nvidia-based cluster, dubbed Vista.

Sabey operates six data center sites across the US in Quincy, Seatle, and East Wenatchee, Washinton; New York City; Austin, Texas; and Ashburn, Virginia.